Flexible calling context reification for aspect-oriented programming

  • Authors:

  • Alex Villazon;Walter Binder;Philippe Moret

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Lugano, Lugano, Switzerland;University of Lugano, Lugano, Switzerland;University of Lugano, Lugano, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 8th ACM international conference on Aspect-oriented software development
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) eases the development of profilers, debuggers, and reverse engineering tools. Such tools frequently rely on calling context information. However, current AOP technology, such as AspectJ, does not offer dedicated support for accessing complete calling context within aspects. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to calling context reification that reconciles flexibility, efficiency, accuracy, and portability. It relies on a generic bytecode instrumentation framework ensuring complete bytecode coverage, including the standard Java class library. We compose our program transformations for calling context reification with the AspectJ weaver, providing the aspect developer an efficient mechanism to manipulate a customizable representation of the complete calling context. To highlight the benefits of our approach, we present ReCrash as an aspect using a stack-based calling context representation; ReCrash is an existing tool that generates unit tests to reproduce program failures. In comparison with the original ReCrash tool, our aspect resolves several limitations, is extensible, covers also the standard Java class library, and causes less overhead.